Parse.com search performance

Question

I have a Parse class, that I want to make searchable on a String attribute . According to Parse's blog the most efficient way to do this is by using a list of lowercased words as your searchable String attribute. For example, instead of "My Search Term", use ["my", "search", "term"].

The problem is, that I want to be able to search substrings as well. So, an object with description "abc" should be returned for any of the following search strings: a, b, c, ab, bc or abc.

I thought about further breaking down the ["my", "search", "term"] tags into more words, so turn "my" into ["m", "y", "my"]. This list might become huge, though, in case of a slightly longer string (consider "search" for example).

Using query.matches would solve this, but is not recommended for large datasets.

So, what is best way to approach this, considering, that most of the tags will be a lot longer than only 2 characters?

Answer 1

You identified correctly the only two reasonable alternatives in parse. And for nontrivial keywords, I think query.matches will be the only workable choice.

Consider relaxing the requirement that the user can search any substring of a string. Isn't it unreasonable to suppose that I might search for the word "requirement" with the string "ire"? If search is limited to matching prefixes, the query can use startsWith.